Aiding Emergency Response to Multiple Casualty Terrorist Bombings Targeting Public Surface Transportation Vehicles

The emergency response process to multiple casualty incidents can be significantly enhanced by employing early assessments on the extent of the damage and life threat. In this paper we present an early scene assessment method, which assumes blast overpressure information retrieved from pressure transducers, for enhancing the response to terrorist bombings which are performed inside public surface transportation vehicles. The method draws best and worst cases scenarios according to different lethality zones, which are computed upon the ESTC empirical indoor blast model. Additionally, we describe our experiments and analyze the corresponding results. Our main contribution relies on enhancing the existing emergency response process by providing early estimations on the number of immediate fatalities and critically injured survivors that responders and medical personnel may expect.